AI now takes into account all of their abilities
Special effects
I also tweaked the level scale for this game to be slightly accelerated to account for 1) no rest stops and 2) only one party member so far. Once your party expands, it'll be less brutal to spread out the leveling up love as you will have 2 party members to ding.

Also related to the level scale is I've fleshed out the beginning to end of "how strong" characters will be. This was pretty crucial as by setting the progression of Tandy, I can then set the difficulty of the enemies (which I've made challenging, but not impossible... but don't get over your head too fast, or you might find yourself kitty filet).

Lastly, I've set up SaveFile versioning. Mostly this will be for production, as I'm still heavily developing the game. If some change that is added that would seriously break the game if you loaded a bad save, it would be good not to load it. I highly recommend this for any game that utilizes saves.

Our main protagonist has been granted with an attacking animation. Not only that, but she also has a full sprite sheet (with her correct color)
Isn't she adorable?
This is her Dialog picture. This pops up anytime she is chatting (meowing?) at various things.

On the engine side, I've added a new RNG (my old trusty Ranrot), I've also made it so you are safe to travel at least one square before you encounter another battle. There were certain play-testers whose random battles were extremely biased (despite a relatively low encounter rate). Overall this just gives a nicer feel to the game's encounter rate.

Also added was support for background music (rain!), screen flashes, removing scripts from other scripts (this creates a kind of lock and key type system, though that also needs to be overhauled as well). This allows me to slightly better guide the player by semi-gating content in hopes to better steer the player in an otherwise VERY open ended map.

Lastly I fixed up some UI bugs for those who get to much higher levels and get to see more of Tandy's abilities.

So is there any new content from this build and the last build? Technically no. Just a much better looking game. These last few weeks are going to be dedicated to content, bad guys, and hopefully finishing up the first level before the contest ends. The engine is nowhere near 100% feature complete and is still missing basic RPG features such as character screens, map and battle sound effects, but these will probably have to wait.

Ran on my 10.6.8 MacBook. Really entertaining little parody game- there wasn't much to the gameplay but I had a nice laugh at the RPG battle with a car, the pigeons spells, and the classic JRPG ending. The only thing I wish was different was that since the gameplay was pretty bare, it might be nicer for either the attack animations to be a little faster or to be able to click to skip attack animations to speed things up.

1. Graphics are nice, although I wouldn’t want to look at them for extended periods of time. Thing that bugged me most about the graphics is that Tandy looks adorable when she’s small, but her dialog picture looks like an ugly old cat (nitpicky).
2. I’m not sure how to use the lick… I generally tend to shy away from turn-based combat games so perhaps it’s an element of the genre, but maybe a read me would be in order? Other than that, had no trouble figuring things out(as far as I know ).
3. I couldn’t figure out how to save, and there doesn’t appear to be any sort of autosave. Wouldn’t be a problem except that every time you die, you get kicked back to the beginning and have to watch the intro, and then watch the rat scurry away. So when I get to the pigeons for the third time and died because I failed to run away… It was a bit frustrating.
4. Minor thing: the pigeon appears to fly under the USPS trucks?

Nice work overall - this was overall a polished entry. Good luck in the contest!

(Oct 3, 2011 08:02 PM)FlamingHairball Wrote: Played a little bit of this one tonight.

1. Graphics are nice, although I wouldn’t want to look at them for extended periods of time. Thing that bugged me most about the graphics is that Tandy looks adorable when she’s small, but her dialog picture looks like an ugly old cat (nitpicky).
2. I’m not sure how to use the lick… I generally tend to shy away from turn-based combat games so perhaps it’s an element of the genre, but maybe a read me would be in order? Other than that, had no trouble figuring things out(as far as I know ).
3. I couldn’t figure out how to save, and there doesn’t appear to be any sort of autosave. Wouldn’t be a problem except that every time you die, you get kicked back to the beginning and have to watch the intro, and then watch the rat scurry away. So when I get to the pigeons for the third time and died because I failed to run away… It was a bit frustrating.
4. Minor thing: the pigeon appears to fly under the USPS trucks?

Nice work overall - this was overall a polished entry. Good luck in the contest!

1) note to self, make dialog kitty have super big bulging adorable eyes of soul sucking.
2) I plan to have a character screen such that you can view everything outside of combat, including what different abilities do
3) same way you save in every application It's actually a pretty slick save system
4) "behind"